Baby Snipers...Propaganda? Or are they just that evil?

[WildCat]

They are that evil... here's a baby sniper practicing on the range:

 

[McHrozni]

As I understand Misrata has been receiving a lot of reinforcements *cough* I mean humanitarian supplies from Benghazi. The Coalition navy sunk or beached a number of Libyan vessels that was trying to intercept these reinforcements *cough* I mean humanitarian supplies from reaching the port.

Since then I understand that the flow of humantarian ammunition and fighters goes unhindered.

Of course this doesn't mean that the 6000 migrant workers camping in the open air at the port guarded by the insurgents can be evacuated. I was kind of puzzled why, since we all seem so concerned about civilians, no one was lifting a finger to move them. I assume that the reason is that if they were allowed contact with the media they might tell some fairly horrific stories - not all of them totally complimentary towards the "Good Guys"

http://www.dawn.com/2011/04/01/thousands-stranded-in-libyan-city-under-siege.html

The Turkish ferry was a large ship - but supposedly only took off 250 wounded - mostly males of fighting age.

As far as I can see, this is utterly irrelevant to the current topic.

McHrozni

 

[Caustic Logic]

Funny you should mention that because this
[qimg]http://cache2.asset-cache.net/xr/111894976.jpg?v=1&c=NewsMaker&k=3&d=77BFBA49EF87892140FEB0FF7845C57D90C84E90A0BC0422050EB25365C38135637CEA3F6B43213E4C1BFF51A650EDCC[/qimg]

If it had been on the other side every UN and human rights organisation on the planet would be huffing and puffing and talking about child soldiers and how Gaddafi was forcing children to fire on civilian protesters.

But because it is on the "Good" side it is just marketed as a cute photo.

http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2011/03/30/alg_libyan-boy-tank.jpg

http://www.kingstonguardian.co.uk/resources/images/1606017/?type=display

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/MSNBC/C...bya-week6/ss-110403-libya-04.photoblog900.jpg

http://www.kingstonguardian.co.uk/resources/images/1606017/?type=display

They're all so cute! That's Libya's future there, and I can feel the strains of that old Whitney Houston song building up to a crescendo!

 

[Caustic Logic]

Edited by kmortis: 

Removed previously moderated content and response to same.

FWIW, a nurse with Medecines sans frontiers nurse helped evacuate injured from Misurata just before this baby snipers report was filed. She mentioned some of the injuries that struck her most. Only two youth under 18 were mentioned, one with a head injury from falling off a truck, the other with severe facial burns from a molotov cocktail or some such. No bullet wounds that she mentioned.

And of course, she's talking injured, not dead. So maybe the sniped tykes are real but have mostly died. Or were too seriously wounded to be moved?

Even if so, we have many options for who's doing it. Gaddafi's been forced to extreme measures, like passing out one million machine guns to loyal citizens. His regime doesn't control the city. It anarchy, as I hear it. It's only natural to hold Gaddafi 100% accountable if just one of these citizens decided the green way is to kill the traitors; children and demoralize them. Better argument for regime change (following a hell of a lot more war), or for a cease fire? The former, of course, if this story turns out to be true or widely enough believed.

 

[geni]

If gaddafi does have snipers sitting around the city they must be getting pretty board so the odd kid getting shot isn't that unexpected.

 

[Caustic Logic]

Here's a support finally for a young kid in Misurata shot with a bulet that nearly killed him. Government sniper? Other sniper? Crossfire?

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2011/04/10/libya-government-attacks-misrata-kill-civilians

He's not in the main article for some reason, but in the bottom picture, with this caption:

Five-and-a-half year old Rakan Ahmed was playing in the street opposite the Italian Consulate on March 19 when a bullet entered his shoulder and passed by his heart, according to his parents, Hanan Faraj and Ahmed Muftah Burjid. There was fighting at the time about 500 meters away, they said, but no sound of gunfire close by. “Rakan’s uncle carried him inside,” Ahmed Muftah Burjid said. “We thought he fainted. There was no sound of a gunshot, no blood.” When the family arrived at the hospital, they saw the bullet from the x-rays, which the family shared with Human Rights Watch. “We were shocked,” Ahmed recalled. “We just thought he was tired.”

 

[BenBurch]

War Sucks.

 

[Mycroft]

Here's a support finally for a young kid in Misurata shot with a bulet that nearly killed him. Government sniper? Other sniper? Crossfire?

Most likely a stray.

 

[little grey rabbit]

Five-and-a-half year old Rakan Ahmed was playing in the street opposite the Italian Consulate on March 19 when a bullet entered his shoulder and passed by his heart, according to his parents, Hanan Faraj and Ahmed Muftah Burjid. There was fighting at the time about 500 meters away, they said, but no sound of gunfire close by. “Rakan’s uncle carried him inside,” Ahmed Muftah Burjid said. “We thought he fainted. There was no sound of a gunshot, no blood.” When the family arrived at the hospital, they saw the bullet from the x-rays, which the family shared with Human Rights Watch. “We were shocked,” Ahmed recalled. “We just thought he was tired.”

Sounds a bit odd. I suppose it might be possible that a child could be shot in the shoulder and his parents not be aware of it. But it is hardly the first thing a clinic does when a child comes and his parents say he is tired - whip him under the x-ray. Perhaps take his shirt of and see the bullet wound, which ought to be enough to convince most parents. Whether or not you take an x-ray when there is a clear exit wound I am not sure.

I have a suspicion that the X-ray that HRW was shown was an X-ray of a magic bullet and I suspect that not only did the bullet pass through the boy, but it also left a big metallic presence in the X-ray photograph. Magical things can happen during a war which the CIA and MI6 take an interest in a particular side and HRW and Amnesty turn up.

As I understand, most civilians have evacuated out of Misrata to camps on the outskirts away from the conflict, but perhaps not everyone. Meanwhile the insurgents do a Fallujah-like defence, drilling holes in thick concrete walls of apartment buildings to make sniper positions almost impregnable to small arms fire.

I have to say, the upside of war is you get to fully revel in the lack of credibility of reporters:

In a Misratah medical clinic lies one of Gaddafi's fighters. The 19-year-old was studying electrical engineering in Tripoli. As the fighting started and his lessons were stopped, he says he was forced to join Gaddafi's forces. "We were kept locked in the camp and trained for two weeks and then they took us to the battalion."

Told that they would be fighting foreign mercenaries, they were brought to Misratah. When they came under heavy fire from the rebels, his officer turned and ran. The teenager followed, and was shot by his own brigade.

translation: insurgent wounded during the conflict telling a transparently false story for reporters. Equally dubious are those "POWs" who suddenly realise they have been living in darkness the entire time and now want to fight Gaddafi.

Quite likely genuine: stories of Libyan soldiers who shoot themselves rather than be captured by Jeffersonian democratic civilian protesters.

 

[Caustic Logic]

a bullet entered his shoulder and passed by his heart, according to his parents,

Sounds kind of like a sniper shot, not unlike what happened to WPC Yvonne Fletcher. Entered the shoulder, hit the heart, lung, etc., and passed out her lower ribs. She just collapsed, little blood, and it took a moment for anyone to realize what had happened to her. There was no visible blood there, either. Gaddafi snipers, it was decided, in both cases. Women and children slaughtered, publics enraged, common threads. We have a precedent.

However ...

I suspect that not only did the bullet pass through the boy, but it also left a big metallic presence in the X-ray photograph.

Good eye, LGR, but no. It's better (worse) than that. Now that I have a minute to look. I presume you refer to the line across the image. That would absolutely be wrong, I think (I did a Google image search, and only bullets show up, never their tracks) but I think that's something irrelevant.

The bullet's still there! Right in the middle.

The bullet is perfectly shaped, no apparent effect from entry. That might have something to with no sign of entry - not a single rib is of this delicate 5-year-old skeleton is disturbed. Tough kid!

But the x-ray shows a bullet still there. It looks like a sniper bullet (? big and pointy ?), fired from a low angle (unless the kid was doing cartwheels), NOT via his shoulder, and just stopping in the middle of him, halfway to his shoulder. In the picture his whole left side is bandaged, we presume wounded beneath.

All I can say is I'm glad they're faking these things in Photoshop instead of actually shooting their own kids to leverage stronger support for regime change efforts. At the moment, I wish Gaddafi would just step down or whatever sometime soon so this absurdity can finally stop.

Anyone else? How far off the rails have I gone here?

 

[McHrozni]

translation: insurgent wounded during the conflict telling a transparently false story for reporters. Equally dubious are those "POWs" who suddenly realise they have been living in darkness the entire time and now want to fight Gaddafi.

What makes this story so transperently false?

McHrozni

 

[Rolfe]

The bullet's still there! Right in the middle.
http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q62/chainsawmoth/x-ray_kid.jpg
The bullet is perfectly shaped, no apparent effect from entry. That might have something to with no sign of entry - not a single rib is of this delicate 5-year-old skeleton is disturbed. Tough kid!

But the x-ray shows a bullet still there. It looks like a sniper bullet (? big and pointy ?), fired from a low angle (unless the kid was doing cartwheels), NOT via his shoulder, and just stopping in the middle of him, halfway to his shoulder. In the picture his whole left side is bandaged, we presume wounded beneath.
http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q62/chainsawmoth/x-ray_kid_mom.jpg
All I can say is I'm glad they're faking these things in Photoshop instead of actually shooting their own kids to leverage stronger support for regime change efforts. At the moment, I wish Gaddafi would just step down or whatever sometime soon so this absurdity can finally stop.

Anyone else? How far off the rails have I gone here?

Show me the lateral view before I make any comment on that.

Rolfe.

 

[Caustic Logic]

Show me the lateral view before I make any comment on that.

Rolfe.

Thank you. A pathologist's view. I am not one. But I note the alleged entry was on the left side I presume, lower ribs - this area is seen transverse, and blurry in the photo. But I'm looking and I think there'd be some visible displacement even with these limitations. It's not a hairline fractures we should be looking for. Not just broken chenks and stuff, there's no deformation to any of these curves either, suggesting stresses short of full fracture. (all bluff, of course)

Also note the photo. How long ago was this purported incident? March 19 to whatever, so about two, three weeks. Any signs of residual trauma you might see that soon after such a serious injury? Pallor, stiffness, swelling, i dunno. Kid looks healthy, limber, and comfy. X-ray shows why, I think.

Not to argue with you, just I don't think we'll get other views (don't think they likely made more than the one), so we'll have to go with what's here.

BTW: McHrozni thinks it looks fake.

 

[McHrozni]

BTW: McHrozni thinks it looks fake.

But claims absolutely no expertise in the field

Contrary to what you might think of me, CL, I don't believe anything that simply agrees with my world view. As any human I am probably inclined to believe something that does more readily than something that doesn't, but that's as far as it goes.

McHrozni

 

[little grey rabbit]

BTW: McHrozni thinks it looks fake.

Well caught.

Thanks for those pictures. It would be interesting the angle the boy was at to get a bullet trajectory like that (on hands and knees with a gunman lying on the ground?) and how the bullet could miss a lung or the heart.... I never bother looking up this kind of stuff anymore because
a. Just about all war stories are like this.
b. It doesn't make any difference anyway, HRW are not deceived but are willing participants. Back in 2004 I checked up one of their atrocity reports in Koreme or Goreme Kurdistan. There were so many errors in their description of the village and there were some obvious signs of deceit - without going into details.

I had wanted to go by myself but in the end was forced to go accompanied by the Mardin chief of police. At the end of the visit, he asked me several times worriedly "You are going to make a report to HRW?" I promised him I wouldn't, although I didn't say that the reason was that I doubted very much HRW had been fooled in the first place.

The elites are raging out of control and all we can do is sit back and let them wreck as much mayhem and havoc, until they have been satiated for a little while.

 

[Rolfe]

Maybe I should explain. An x-ray is a two-dimensional view. It shows you the position in the plane perpendicular to the direction of the x-ray beam. It does not show you the depth. Not at all.

It is essential in a case like this to take both a dorso-ventral plate (shown) and a lateral plate (not shown) to determine where in the body that object is loged. That simply cannot be determined from a single view.

A surgeon would look at both views, and examine the patient, and decide first where the object is, and second, how to remove it. The question of whether one actually wants to remove it at all will also come up of course. Do we know how the child was managed? Did they remove the bullet, and if so from where did they remove it? If they didn't, what were the clinical reasons for deciding to leave it in situ?

I could certainly buy the idea that a child out playing was accidentally hit by a stray round, and the bullet lodged somewhere that looked spectacular on the x-ray, but in fact was not a huge clinical concern. I'd need a lot more information on the case though.

I couldn't be sure these pictures are faked. I'd be a lot more likely to suspect someone putting their own spin on a set of circumstances that in fact bear only a tangential relationship to the scenario they are presenting.

Rolfe.

 

[Caustic Logic]

Well, that sounds like the right way to go about things in an ideal situation. But the key thing is, that bullet seems to be well inside his rib cage. And there's no door on that cage, just bones that I would imagine would be disturbed.

It's also a very weird angle, and contradicts what his parent said about it entering at his shoulder.

Another whole separate problem: yet another very young sniper victim in Misurata!
http://feb17.info/media/video-interview-battalion-snipers-targeting-children-in-misurata-translated/
“a small girl, no older than 4 years, who was targeted by a sniper’s bullet near the heart. But thank God, they removed the bullet, as you can see.” Bullet is shown in a vial. At 3:25 they show the x-ray from this girl, and I think it's the same exact image we're looking at here. This time, in a hospital setting, with the girl curled up on the bed under a blanket.

Those industrious Misrata doctors!

I'm really not trying hard to find this much dirt. In fact, I've been very pressed for time. These people are just that transparent is all.

Go team human rights! Destroy Gaddafi!

 

[Rolfe]

Yes, I think it's the same x-ray. They don't let you get so clear a view of it, but just about everything I can see of it is in exactly the same position.

You simply can't tell whether that bullet is in the rib cage or not. That's what I keep telling you. You get NO depth perception on an x-ray at all.

Actually, come to think of it, it would be simplicity itself to fake the damn thing by getting the child to lie on the bullet, or to place it on top of her while the film was taken. Looking at the pictures, my guess would be on top. An expert radiologist might be able to tell by looking at the actual film. Of course you couldn't fake a pair of films like that, you'd never get the lateral view to line up.

So it could be faked, far easier than using Photoshop, or if could be a real picture of a child with a bullet in a relatively superficial position. It could even be a picture of a dead child.

It could be a genuine picture of either of these children.

What it is not, is a picture of both of them.

Rolfe.

 

[geni]

From a millitry POV the odd kid getting shot means nothing one way or the other. Misrata is meant to be something of a war zone kids do get shot in such areas.

However from a millitry POV misrata makes no sense in general. The rebels can't fight. We've seen that. If the Vactican decided to invade libya the Swiss guard would be drinking tea in benghazi within 48 hours. That the rebels can hold Misrata is odd.

Still perhaps the misrata rebels are better fighters than the benghazi mob. But then the casulty profile makes no sense. Gaddafi has some forces and the ability to bombard the city. The casulties should be massive. Hospitals shouldn't be slightly crowded but either flattened or full beyond overflowing. Kids shouldn't be playing in the street but hiding in cellers praying to whatever gods they belive in.

Instead we have what? the odd person shot and a bit of bombarding of the harbour.

It's possible that Gaddafi has only thrown a thin perimiter around the city and most of his forces are facing off against the benghazi mob but in that case why haven't the rebels been able to break out after we bombed the surrounding forces?

 

[Jekyll's Guest]

I'll be honest, the first image in my mind was toddlers making last second EBAY bids.